Talking bugs with theNAT's Dr. Michael Wall

San Diego Natural History Museum to host bug and beer tasting event May 1

Maren Dougherty, director of external affairs at the Balboa Park Online Collaborative, is an arts blogger for U-T San Diego and writes about arts and events at Balboa Park.

Boy it changes every day, but I’ll give you what mine is right now. My current favorites are bee flies. You see them when you are out hiking. A lot of people think that they are bees because they have really hairy bottoms and they look like a bee, but they are flies. The thing that I like about them is their lifestyle. They lay eggs into the nests of other ground-nesting insects. Their larvae creep down in there and the kind of “vampire” on to the other larvae that are developing on this ground nest. And they are just cool.

You would find those at Lake Poway or any place like that?

Yeah, any place where you hike around here there are bee flies. They are the ones that will often hover over a trail. It looks like a bee, but they are hovering. Bees forage around and try to go to from flower to flower. Bee flies will just hover over the trail. Often they have a silver glint to the hair on them.

Can you explain the concept of the part of the exhibition theNAT put together?

In the traveling “Dr. Entomo’s” part, the insects and the other arthropods in there are from all over the world – some are from South America, some are from Africa, some are local. So, we wanted to really make sure we focused on local stories for people, because we are a regional museum and try to focus on local elements. But we wanted to keep with that sideshow kind of feel, so we developed three different sideshow stories.

One has to do with zombie Jerusalem Crickets, where Jerusalem crickets get parasitized by these worms and they actually do turn into zombies.

Another is “clash of the titans” between a tarantula hawk and a tarantula. They battle it out. The tarantula hawk tries to paralyze them and lay an egg inside of them or on them.

Then the other theme is “alien invasion.” It has to do with an entirely new species of ant and how they are wiping out all the native species of ant. And how the impacts of that kind of move up the food chain, because there is this lizard, a Coast Horned Lizard, that eats ants and it does not recognize Argentine ants as food; they are too small. So because of that, we see a decline in these lizards. These changes happen at a scale where we might not think that it matters because “an ant is an ant is an ant” kind of thing. But when you shrink yourself down and you imagine that you are a Coast Horned Lizard, all of a sudden the difference a little ant and a big ant is like the difference between a rat and a goat.

And then, of course, we have our Wall of Wonder. I think it is actually the wall of not-so-exotic wonders, because it is local species. That is something I often get questions about: “I want to identify some insects that I saw in yard, where in the museum can I see them?”